With those words, she deliberately removed her hand from my wrist and stepped away, crossing her arms and staring up at me defiantly.
Then, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed to the ground.
I rushed over, but Kayleigh was already struggling back to her feet, almond-shaped eyes wide. She shied away from my extended hand with a hiss.
“What’s—?”
“Shh!” She took another careful step away from me on wobbly legs, turning toward the woods behind us. After a long moment, she shuddered. The look she sent back at me was troubled.
“What is it?”
“Fear. Out there.” Vibe’s voice was strangled. “And strong.”
“How strong?”
“Stronger than when Olympia looks at you. Thick enough to choke on.” She frowned and cocked her head. “And almost lost beneath that, there’s something else. Anger. Lust. Glee.”
“You’re getting all of that from one person?”
Kayleigh shook her head. “The fear is one person. A woman, I think. The rest is someone else. Maybe multiple someones. It’s hard to hear beneath her terror.” Her voice cracked slightly. “I think… I think she’s in trouble.”
This wasn’t the sort of shit that was supposed to happen on the most securely guarded campus in the entire Free States. I scanned around us one more time. Still dark. Still empty. No Tempest. No Dominion. No faculty, for that matter. Just an Empath with barely any control and a Crow with no real powers to control.
And someone else, terrified for her life.
I’d barely found Alexa’s clearing, even with directions. There was no chance I’d be able to find someone in the woods at night. But Vibe… “Can you track any of them by their emotions?”
“The woman. At least, I think so. She’s drowning everything else out though.”
“I won’t be able to shield you.” If I touched Kayleigh, she’d lose her ability to feel the other woman and we’d never find her. But that meant she’d have to weather all that fear on her own.
“I’ll manage.” The jury was still out on the rest of us, but those two words, uttered with weary, resigned determination, told me that Vibe was going to be one hell of a Cape.
Assuming either of us lived that long.
“Then let’s go.”
We headed into the darkness, Mom’s ghost trailing behind.
CHAPTER 32
A minute into the woods was enough to confirm that I’d have been hopelessly lost without Kayleigh. The combination of a full moon and the city’s ever-present glow kept things from being pitch black, but everything looked the same to me; nothing but trees, trees, and oh look, what’s that? More fucking trees.
I knew Vibe had grown up in a city, like me, but she seemed comfortable in the dark woods. She led us ever deeper into the forest, pausing only occasionally to correct our path. The woods weren’t huge, but we spent five minutes weaving back and forth before I heard anything beyond our own noisy passage.
Someone was rushing through the woods ahead of us.
Kayleigh changed course one last time. We broke out into another small clearing, maybe half the size of our group’s meeting place, and without that space’s phenomenal view. Several small trees had fallen, creating this brief break in the blanket of forest. A moment later, a woman burst into the clearing from the opposite direction, hair flowing behind her, the moonlight highlighting tear streaks down her face.
She saw us, let out a little shriek, and tried desperately to turn, but her feet slid out from under her, and she went down with a thump and a crack where she impacted another of the fallen trees.
“Crap.” Kayleigh headed over to the fallen woman. “This is her.”
With our help, the women was quickly upright again, but she was unsteady on her feet, the back of her head matted with blood from where she’d struck the tree trunk. Her clothes were torn and muddy, her eyes wide and terrified.
With the three of us motionless, I could hear other sounds now; low growls and a high-pitched cackle. Whoever they were… whatever they were…they were coming closer.
“Can you project fear as well as sense it, Kayleigh?”
The Empath shook her head. “You’d need a Siren for that, like Prince.”
Fuck. I looked from Vibe to the woman she was supporting. “Can you get her to safety then?”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“We don’t have a choice,” I told her, conscious of the sounds of pursuit getting closer. “There’s no way she can move fast enough to get away from whoever’s hunting her.”
“Then we’ll stop them together,” she insisted. “I’m a Cape-in-training, just like you.”
“Kayleigh, there aren’t any dampeners here, and fights—real fights—are nothing but emotion.”
“You think I’m a liability?”
“I think we need someone to get her to safety and someone to stop what’s coming. Let’s play to our strengths.”
She would have argued further—seemed prepared to do so, even—but we could both hear that the hunters were only moments away. With a scowl, Kayleigh helped the other woman hobble out of the clearing.
•—•—•
One thing Jessica Strich had always harped on was the value of picking our battlegrounds. I took advantage of the few seconds left to put the moon at my back and a fallen tree between me and whoever was coming.
They loped out of the darkness like feral nightmares, the one on the left giggling now instead of cackling, the larger shape on his right almost entirely silent. As they came to a sudden halt in the clearing, the moonlight was enough to tell me I was well and truly fucked.
The small one was close to my height and half again as wide, a sleeveless shirt exposing corded muscle and hairy arms. The other one was almost Titan-sized and similarly dressed. But that wasn’t the part that had my balls climbing into my stomach. Size matters—no matter how the vids tried to pretend otherwise—and numbers really matter, but both can be overcome with enough skill and motivation.
I wasn’t too sure about my skill,
